In the beginning was the word. The word was the word of God. The same was in the beginning with God. The same is in the beginning of this story, which starts its main action in the seventeenth century, the century of the great philosophers Hobbes and Locke. This period is known as ‘Early Modern’, and the century of Hobbes and Locke is also the century of Galileo and Newton – science, it would seem, rather than religion, the start of the thrusting, modern, scientific world. However, if we look at Hobbes and Locke, we find among their own words extensive use of the word of God, extensive use, that is, of the Christian Bible. Locke wrote a Paraphrase of the Epistles of St Paul, an account of part of the Bible. He wrote a work, The Reasonableness of Christianity, whose whole argument is composed of quotations from the Bible. His battle in political philosophy with Robert Filmer is a battle of biblical texts. Hobbes, by contrast, was notorious in his day as an unbeliever, or heretic. Yet in the famous frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan, behind the figure of the sovereign ruler made up of many little people, stands the word of God. Running on each side of the ruler's crown are words from the Bible. Leviathan is licensed by the word, and the original leviathan was a ferocious biblical beast.